Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 13.djvu/266

camp and making it more secure for the eleven thousand five hundred men who had sought refuge there. The success of the first day was not followed up on the second day. The wounding of our illustrious commander and other causes prevented an united*attack upon Sum- ner, which must have crushed him. There was no fighting the second day to speak of except by Pickett, who started on his own accord and stopped when he pleased, or after he had driven the enemy to the brush, as he expressed it.

Seven Pines was not altogether a barren victory. It delayed McClellan until Jackson was brought upon his flank. It gave a splendid exhibition of dash and courage, and that had a most inspirit- ing effect upon the subsequent campaign.

Longstreet's division lost five hundred men; mine, 2,992, out of nine thousand men engaged. The Sixth Alabama and the Fourth North Carolina lost sixty per cent, of the men brought into action. Carter's battery lost fifty-nine per cent.

I was looking at the battery and was within ten yards of it, when a shell exploded just before the muzzle of one of its pieces, and all the men at it and the horses at the limber went down before it. They seemed to me all huddled together "in one red burial blent." An officer ran up and pulled out one live man from the confused pile. Two men were killed, five wounded, and two horses were killed by that one explosion. The wounded appeared, for the time being, to be paralyzed, as only one was pulled out at first. This was the most destructive shot I had ever seen up to that time, but I afterwards saw one worse at Malvern Hill and one worse at Sharpsburg. It was the enemy's artillery in all three cases that was so deadly. This havoc in Carter's battery was in the pentago- nal redoubt after its capture.

Two-thirds ot the loss in Rodes's brigade was after Casey's works had been taken and his division and Couch's had been driven off. Berry's brigade, of Kearney's division, had been turned off into the slashes when Carter's fire had made a direct advance impracticable. There it was joined by one of Abercrombie's regiments, and possi by rallied fragments of the defeated divisions, and securely sheltered behind large trees and heavy fallen timber, they kept up a murderous fire upon Rodes's men in the open field, though the advance of An- derson and Jenkins had cut them off from their comrades. Federals escaped after nightfall by taking a circuitous path t the woods, round by Anderson's saw-mill.